A little. I'm sure there's enough power there to make a wide variety of really fun games, but there will be some kinds of games out of its reach of course, with all the super high end bells and whistles. But there also will be clever folk who find ways to work with the tools they're given and make it do things you didn't think were possible, or at least seem to. If Ouya were starting out on a Tegra4 footing I would be a lot more comfortable but I think the price point would be a lot higher.
Making a wild guess, I think the Ouya might match or outperform the Wii. Tegra 3 games are anything but ugly, so we're still looking at games with nice visuals. Hey, if it avoids developers from investing into scenery porn rather than actual content, it's a plus.
The Wii was a generation out of date the day it launched, OUYA tops the Wii no prob.The Wii only supported fixed function pipeline rendering, no shaders at all. No proper widescreen or HD support, or surround sound either.
Shadowgun already looks about 80 percent as good as Gears of War, and thats with a fairly general purpose engine (Unity). Shadowgun blows away anything the PS2 was capable of. I'd say we're alot closer to the 360 for power then the first XBox. Its certainly somewhere in between.
The Wii did have shaders, but they weren't anything like what you expect a shader to be. We used them a lot in our games. Texture EnVironment units (TEV) were a pain to write, but we got quite a lot of good effects out of them despite the limitations.
I disagree. I found the ouya to be more powerful than i expected.
Especialy the fillrate (fragment shader) performance is pretty good.
It has enough fillrate to do 60fps 1920x1080.
Not if you're doing anything fancy - to maintain 60fps at 1920x1080 you'd probably need to keep your game to around 15-20 draw calls with fairly simple shaders. My game currently runs close to (but not quite reaching) 60fps at 720p with 35-40 draw calls, at 1080p that drops to just over 30fps.
However, in terms of triangles, the console seems pretty damn beefy.
Usually when you buy a console you expect it to last, the xbox360 lasted 8 years before you needed to buy the new one. Now if you look at the ouya its already underpowered, meaning in 6 months the current phones are going be more powerful it, okay 2 years later and you cant even play the latest and greatest android games on your ouya (unless we are getting a new console every 6 months or whatever).
I don't think it's really all that relevant to compare cell phone graphics to a large tv screen. It may be technically true that some cell phones have higher rendering performance, given a relatively much lower resolution also, but they're most likely not running at 1080p either, most likely even less than 720p. Ouya probably has to output at least double the amount of pixels to fill a screen. Also we have no idea of the Ouya roadmap, for all we know they may come out with Ouya 2 in 1-2 years with Tegra 4 or Tegra 5 in it.
A game like shadowgun does a lot of pretty fancy tricks to make the game look better and yet do so efficiently given the constraints. So if you're stuck for performance then you need to think more carefully about optimizing and finding workarounds.
Usually when you buy a console you expect it to last, the xbox360 lasted 8 years before you needed to buy the new one. Now if you look at the ouya its already underpowered, meaning in 6 months the current phones are going be more powerful it, okay 2 years later and you cant even play the latest and greatest android games on your ouya (unless we are getting a new console every 6 months or whatever).
Underpowered compared to what? Xbox 360 was underpowered when it launched - its graphics architecture was two years out of date, its CPU rather slow by PC standards (though to make up for it it had 3 cores, when at the time dual core PC CPU's were top of the line).
And if you expect most Android games to be so far advanced in two years that they couldn't run on OUYA at all, you need to learn more about the gaming and cell phone industries :) Normal people are slow to adopt new cell phones - people are still buying iPhone 4, though it's had two MAJOR revisions since then and is getting close to a third. So Android developers (unlike us) have to support really crappy devices long after they've become obsolete. And of course there's the issue of budget - to take full advantage of vastly more powerful hardware requires a vastly higher budget, mainly to create the extra detailed models, textures, animations, and lighting. It does no good for the hardware to support a billion polygons per second without the budget to create models that use those. And neither Android nor OUYA really attract the type of developers to make such high-budget games, though I'm sure the OUYA folks would love to have some on the device.
There's a reason the game industy is where it is right now. Independently financed third party developers still to this day can't afford to make games that push the 360 and PS3 to their limits, the team sizes to do this is rediculous. We don't need more power, we need less hurdles to making proper video games and a compentent, low cost open development environment with a good controller. OUYA delivers on all my needs as a game developer, lets hope it sells well (being sold in Best Buy and such is a good step!).
Wii had proper widescreen support, but not HD. Most 480p games supported widescreen.
Not really, it has anamorphic widescreen. The back buffer can't be more then 640x480. If the system is running in "widescreen mode", internally it blitted and scaled that same back buffer to an 854x480 front buffer. There was no realized increase in pixel resolution by running in widescreen (which in my book isn't proper widescreen support).
For 480p that's the *only* widescreen support that the ATSC standard allows. 480p is defined as a resolution of 704x480, regardless of widescreen or not. 854x480 is a fake resolution created so that flat panel monitors could simulate anamorphic widescreen without having the ability to stretch pixels. It's those monitors that are doing the scaling, and the only things that support that as a native resolution are computers and devices that aren't made to output only to a television set.
Not if you're doing anything fancy - to maintain 60fps at 1920x1080 you'd probably need to keep your game to around 15-20 draw calls with fairly simple shaders. My game currently runs close to (but not quite reaching) 60fps at 720p with 35-40 draw calls, at 1080p that drops to just over 30fps.
However, in terms of triangles, the console seems pretty damn beefy.
Lowering drawcount does not reduce the burden on the fragment shader.
It will mainly ease the burden on the cpu.
If you hit 60 at 720p with 40 calls, and 30fps at 1080p, then lowering drawcalls will not help at all.
My shaders are pretty complex, but apart from a single shadowmap do not use textures.
mindbend
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The Wii was a generation out of date the day it launched, OUYA tops the Wii no prob.The Wii only supported fixed function pipeline rendering, no shaders at all. No proper widescreen or HD support, or surround sound either.
Shadowgun already looks about 80 percent as good as Gears of War, and thats with a fairly general purpose engine (Unity). Shadowgun blows away anything the PS2 was capable of. I'd say we're alot closer to the 360 for power then the first XBox. Its certainly somewhere in between.
Not if you're doing anything fancy - to maintain 60fps at 1920x1080 you'd probably need to keep your game to around 15-20 draw calls with fairly simple shaders. My game currently runs close to (but not quite reaching) 60fps at 720p with 35-40 draw calls, at 1080p that drops to just over 30fps.
However, in terms of triangles, the console seems pretty damn beefy.
Underpowered compared to what? Xbox 360 was underpowered when it launched - its graphics architecture was two years out of date, its CPU rather slow by PC standards (though to make up for it it had 3 cores, when at the time dual core PC CPU's were top of the line).
And if you expect most Android games to be so far advanced in two years that they couldn't run on OUYA at all, you need to learn more about the gaming and cell phone industries :) Normal people are slow to adopt new cell phones - people are still buying iPhone 4, though it's had two MAJOR revisions since then and is getting close to a third. So Android developers (unlike us) have to support really crappy devices long after they've become obsolete. And of course there's the issue of budget - to take full advantage of vastly more powerful hardware requires a vastly higher budget, mainly to create the extra detailed models, textures, animations, and lighting. It does no good for the hardware to support a billion polygons per second without the budget to create models that use those. And neither Android nor OUYA really attract the type of developers to make such high-budget games, though I'm sure the OUYA folks would love to have some on the device.
Not really, it has anamorphic widescreen. The back buffer can't be more then 640x480. If the system is running in "widescreen mode", internally it blitted and scaled that same back buffer to an 854x480 front buffer. There was no realized increase in pixel resolution by running in widescreen (which in my book isn't proper widescreen support).